


Distractions

by Huggle



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bruce Banner & Tony Stark Friendship, Bruce Just Needs Time, Clint Barton Whump, Declarations Of Love, Hurt Clint Barton, M/M, Scared Bruce Banner
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:13:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25665718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Huggle/pseuds/Huggle
Summary: When Clint Barton turns up in Bruce’s lab on their first day in the tower, Bruce is wary of this man who works for the same government that’s been hunting him down all these years.Over time, things change.
Relationships: Bruce Banner/Clint Barton
Comments: 10
Kudos: 78





	Distractions

**Author's Note:**

> Found a prompt at the Avengers Kink Meme. What can I say, I miss our team.

**The First Time**

It’s...it’s not that Bruce isn’t grateful. He has an actual _bed_ now, and Tony’s assured him maybe a dozen or more times that he can raid the fridge as often as he wants, that the entire tower is his to roam around (obviously, respecting the others’ space) and that it’s secure so he doesn’t have to worry about a certain pain in the ass general making any moves on him.

He gets it, that Tony’s desperate for Bruce to know he is safe here, and he’s probably given different versions of the talk to Thor, and Natasha, and Barton, and Rodgers. 

Bruce suspects not as often as he’s done for him, and he ends up hiding out in the lab (lab, he also has a lab, and it could make the one he used to have when he was corporate financed just crawl into a corner and weep).

There’s something...grounding about opening up boxes, and setting up desks and the computers, and the rest of the equipment. Even if he has to strain a couple of times because even a lot of the more advanced tech just isn’t made to be moved around by one man when his skin isn’t green.

When the door opens, he startles, and looks up to find Agent Barton standing there, with a large box in his arms.

“Hey,” he says, and looks around him. “Wow. Kind of thought it’d be _pret-a-science_ in here.”

Bruce shrugs, lets his heart rate settle. He has to stop thinking every time somebody comes into a room where he is that it’s Ross or a soldier. Although, this time, he’s more worried about it being Tony which makes him feel ridiculous and ungrateful at the same time.

Barton frowns when he obviously notices.

“You okay?”

He still hasn’t come in.

Bruce nods, coughs a little and then points to the box. “Uh, that for me?”

Barton doesn’t come in until Bruce waves him forward. “It’s got your name on it. Don’t worry, we checked it out. It’s okay.”

He’s comforted by that, he supposes, but this man still technically works for the same government that Ross does, that his men do, and he can’t help but feel like the minute he turns his back there’s a cloth soaked with chloroform or a cunningly concealed hypodermic needle in his future, followed by waking up hooded in the back of a van.

Which is probably wholly unfair to Barton, especially given what he’s been through, and how he fought at Hulk’s side.

Old habits, though, so he keeps a wary eye on the SHIELD agent as he puts the box down on a table and then looks around him.

“You want some help? Tony offered to suit up and come in…”

God, _no_.

“But I told him we could handle it. Thor is...trying to patch Asgardian tech in with Tony’s and rearrange his floor and it is not going down too well.”

Bruce hears an ominous thump from the floor above, and Hulk shifts uneasily inside him.

Barton pushes the box in his direction, and Bruce looks down at it, and Barton says, “Maybe take a look, see what you’ve got,” and Bruce knows…

He’s being handled, but that was inevitable, wasn’t it? 

He’s a little surprised to find he’s not as bothered this time as before, and he opens up the box to lift out what looks like an old fashioned microscope. 

There’s a handwritten note with it, and he recognises the scrawl as belonging to one of his old professors, and a shy grin forms before he remembers he’s not alone.

He tucks the note in his pocket, but Barton doesn’t ask, and just turns to the piece of equipment Bruce was trying to move.

He doesn’t touch it, just glances back at Bruce. 

“So. Do you?”

Bruce frowns at him. 

“Need a hand.” Clint’s lips twitch into a smile, but there’s nothing mocking about it; in fact...if Bruce could forget for just a moment that this guy works for an organisation that had a huge cell custom built for him and never got around to telling him until they stuck Loki in it…

That smile might be kind of cute.

“Yeah,” he says. Because he might as well keep Barton where he can see him, and maybe…

Maybe he’s not the only person who needs some place to hide right now.

**The Second Time**

It’s there. Bruce knows it is. He’s looking at data scrolling endlessly across his screen, a full chemical analysis of the compound they’d discovered when they visited the werewolf dimension (what’s next, he thinks; worlds inhabited by sentient giant spiders? And then grimaces and curses himself because the universe is probably listening) and somewhere in all of it is a way to fix the world.

Everybody knows they’re on borrowed time, that they have to hit the brakes before they reach that cliff edge, but this...this might actually provide a way to do it, a chemical reaction that could provide clean energy, for the entire planet.

He hears the door open, and pauses the display, because now that Tony’s done being chewed out by the UN for uh, bypassing, the restrictions they’d put in place on the Avengers just popping through dimensional portals (like Tony would ever be as reckless to put them, or the world, in harm’s way, and like they wouldn’t intervene if he just didn’t see the risk), they can get down to saving the planet. 

Again.

“How many of them did you leave in tears this time?” Because there’s a reason that no cameras are allowed in on the ‘hearings’ which sounds better than ‘The Jump Tony Stark Hour, Or Try To’, and he’s heard rumours that more than a few of the representatives find excuses, now, to be elsewhere rather than face Tony’s withering sarcasm.

“I didn’t count.”

Bruce turns to see Clint standing there.

Barely.

His suit is torn, and there’s blood trickling down his cheek from a cut, and more blood on what looks like an actual _bite_ on his bare shoulder, and he’s got one arm pressed against his ribs like he’s trying to hold them together.

“Clint.”

“Hey, doc.” He seems to be having trouble focusing; Clint looks around him like he isn’t quite sure how he got there, and then his eyes roll back in his head and his body starts to fold.

Bruce reaches him just in time, has to strain a little to keep him from hitting the floor; one of them is a trained agent who’s at the peak of his physical fitness, and Bruce...okay, he isn’t, and he doesn’t think trying to coax Hulk out to lift Clint up is a good idea right then.

He can already hear the other guy’s concerned rumblings and Hulk…. 

He doesn’t really do gentle.

Bruce carefully lays Clint back, and tugs open his tunic. There’s one hell of a bruise already starting to form over his ribs, and Bruce starts to gently feel his way around the archer’s body.

“JARVIS, we’re going to need medical support from SHIELD. Can you call them? And tell the others?”

“There’s already a SHIELD helicopter inbound. Apparently, Agent Barton left their infirmary AMA.”

Bruce shakes his head. Given Clint’s injuries, he doubts this was any conscious attempt to avoid medical care. Clint is stubborn, but not stupid. Especially since Bruce sees that the fingers of his right hand are broken, and, he suspects, from the uneven feeling as he runs his hand across the bone, maybe his pelvis too.

He made his way across town like this.

Bruce strips off his lab coat, and covers Clint with it, keeps one hand on his wrist, to check his pulse, and then gently pushes his hair back from his forehead.

It’s tacky with blood.

“You,” he says, and then shakes his head. Clint will be okay; SHIELD has the best medical facility in the world, mostly because Tony’s equipped it (after all, two of his favourite people end up there, one of them more than the other, and Clint tossed a cushion at him for that).

Even if they didn’t, Thor would just take Clint to Asgard if things got so bad SHIELD couldn’t help him.

So he’ll be fine.

He keeps telling himself that as Tony bursts in and stares in open horror at their unconscious teammate while Thor looks around him as if he expects to find the person responsible standing there awaiting his wrath.

Like Hulk wouldn’t have already ripped that person apart and then ground what was left into the floor.

He’ll be fine, Bruce tells himself, again, but he can’t settle, Hulk can’t settle, until hours later when Clint is out of surgery and awake if groggy and telling them that apparently, giant sentient spiders are a thing.

Bruce resolves to try and never think of anything ever again.

**The Third Time**

“I think I love you,” Bruce says. 

The smell of Chinese food has him nearly salivating; he hadn’t known how hungry he was until Clint is suddenly standing there with takeout.

“Think?” Clint pouts a little and nudges Bruce’s carton towards him with a pair of chopsticks.

Bruce blushes a little, and lets his hand rest on top of Clint’s. 

It’s just...It’s not easy for him, because the last time he told somebody he loved them, it turned into the biggest train wreck in the world, and if a relationship with Betty could be described as complicated, then this…

But at the same time, he knows it’s not complicated for Clint. Clint sees the world for what it is, grimy and dark and with no guarantees. He doesn’t let it hold him back, but he also respects that Bruce...Bruce is warier.

He finds it hard to hold on to something when it might get torn away from him anyway (which is the reason why he still has a little money, not much, secreted away, and a passport in somebody else’s name, and a rucksack with a few days clothes stuffed under his bed).

It’s why he’s been holding back with Clint, because while he’s gotten over his fear that Clint might be some kind of honey trap set up by Ross to either kidnap him when his guard is down (if so, Ross is playing the long game here, and so is Clint) or just to monitor his movements and what he gets up to on the team (Ross could just tune into CNN for that; they can’t step outside without somebody filming them) or in the lab, he’d be an idiot to ignore just how dangerous their lives are.

Just this past month, they’ve faced an invasion of serpents, a prototype combat AI that took over a bunch of tanks and drove them into the city, some aging sea deity that suddenly decided to declare war by flooding the first mile or so past the shoreline, and then…

Then there was what he can only describe as a sentient shroud that somehow got over Bifrost and came for Thor and got Clint first.

Thor called it something, but Bruce was a little busy hulking it out to remember what; in the end it took all three of them, the other guy, Tony and Thor to unravel it, rip it from around Clint and then several anxious minutes of CPR and Tony using his suit to shock Clint before he came around.

With more cracked ribs, but, thankfully, no brain damage.

He’s not as brave as Clint; he can’t reach for this, openly, honestly, when he thinks the minute he does, fate or karma or whatever you want to blame, will just snatch it away.

Except…. he hasn’t said those words to Clint and he’s already lost him so many times. Clint is...there’s no denying he’s fragile, compared to Bruce and his alter ego.

Somebody could try to run Bruce over with a train, and he’d be green before the impact and then he’d rip the damn thing apart.

Clint would need to get out of the way, but Bruce’s fear is the day he’s tied to the tracks and just can’t and Bruce doesn’t reach him in time.

But in so many other ways, Clint’s stronger than Bruce and Hulk combined, and maybe…. Maybe, Bruce just needs to accept that he has to take some risk here. Because Clint has; Clint’s opened himself up to Bruce, left himself vulnerable and exposed, and Bruce can’t just leave him out there like that.

And he’d rather have something with Clint, especially if the worst happens, than look back and realise he ended up not just with nothing, but hurting Clint because he was too scared to take a chance.

He pulls Clint to him, and maybe it's not the hottest kiss they’ve shared, but he can’t look Clint in the eyes, ends up pressing their foreheads together as Clint grabs his waist, holding him up, which is good because he’s trembling.

“Bruce.”

“I love you.”

Clint kisses him, and Bruce forces himself to open his eyes, and if he thought Clint had a cute smile that first day in the lab, it’s nothing to how he looks now.


End file.
